Redneck Island

The Ether talks about the making of the title
sequence and show package for CMT’s southern reality
series

Set to the raucous country tune, “Longnecks and
Rednecks,” Country Music Television’s (CMT) hit reality
show Redneck Island boasts an opening title sequence that
is infectious, fun and original. The 30-second open, which was
created in Cinema 4D by the award-winning design agency, The Ether,
contains snippets of the show, including shots of bikini-clad women
applying bright pink nail polish to a chicken’s talons.
Introductions of the cast culminate in an animated Tiki likeness of
actor and former WWE superstar Steve Austin, the show’s host
and self-proclaimed “redneck.”

CMT contacted Greg Kupiec, The Ether’s founder and
creative director, on a Friday night asking if his team could
create the opening titles, as well as a show package for the new
reality series. The only catch was, they needed style frames by
Monday. After brainstorming all weekend, Kupiec and the
project’s design team delivered 15 concepts on Monday
morning.

“It was one of the fastest turnarounds we’ve ever
had,” said Kupiec, adding that the team delivered some
hand-drawn concepts and some that were created in Illustrator and
Photoshop. “But having worked with CMT in the past on
Texas Women, Redneck Wedding and 12 Days of
Redneck Christmas, we felt comfortable showing them our
process, and they gave us carte blanche to come up with something
exciting.” (Watch the opener here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoKN6W3E_pk&list=UU44sUZUHGghCeAVTXF6og_A&index=1&feature=plcp.)

Tiki time

Once approvals were in place, The Ether had one month to deliver
the opening titles, bumps, promo elements and lower thirds. CMT
particularly liked The Ether’s idea of using an animated Tiki
statue resembling Steve Austin, but making a statue that actually
looked like the host proved challenging. “At first the statue
kind of looked like a plush toy,” recalls 3D designer and
animator Matt Mojica. “We had never modeled anything that
organic-looking before.”

The remedy turned out to be adding more definition to the
Tiki’s face and adding indentations that made the mouth look
more gnarled. Working with fellow designer Andy Austin, Mojica
sculpted points until The Ether team had something they were happy
with. “Everything was done with object symmetry, so we only
needed to focus on one side of the head,” Mojica says. They
knew they had it right when Austin tweeted a photo of the Tiki to
the show’s host to get his reaction. His reply was simply,
“Word.” And “It validated everything,”
Austin recalls.

Every couple of days CMT sent additional footage from the show
to The Ether for editing and refining. Final compositing was done
in After Effects. “There’s always very clear direction
from CMT,” says Kupiec. “They don’t want this
show to be Survivor, they want to own the Redneck brand
and the shots they chose were based in part on that creative
philosophy.”

The role of type

Typography always plays an important role in every project The
Ether does, and the Redneck Island logo and title
treatment were no exception. Believing that typography is an
incredibly important, but often overlooked, aspect of design,
Kupiec and his team searched for “Tiki-style” fonts and
used them as inspiration when developing their own original
tiki-esque font. Using Cinema 4D, they spent hours experimenting
overlapping letters in different ways and trying out horizontal and
vertical possibilities. “With Cinema it’s really simple
to get a good looking result, especially with type,” says
Kupiec. (Check out The Ether’s reel here: http://www.theetherdesign.com/#/site.)

Austin supported the idea of using a Tiki-style font, so the
main hurdles to overcome were ensuring that the font was legible
and that the show’s editors could easily type it in for lower
thirds.“The font had to have style to it, but it also had to
be able to be used all throughout the show for consistency,”
Kupiec points out.

For the elements of the show package that use 3D type, The
Ether’s designers beta tested a new plug-in called Kern-it
(http://c4dtools.net), and were happy with the results.
“Kern-it worked out really well for this project because
Redneck Island does have a few show package elements like
the Coming Up bump that swing into place and that was all done in
3D,” says Kupiec, noting that the plug-in was especially
helpful because it allowed them to kern letters “on the
fly” within C4D.

Modeling the elements

The Ether team used C4D to model most of the elements in the
opener and the show package from scratch, including the island
that’s visible in the background of the opening titles. To
flesh out scenes, they also used a few stock models of things like
trees and foliage that are included with Cinema 4D, as well as
models they purchased online.

The subtle movement of trees and foliage was created using
deformers in C4D. “It took a little bit of time because of
how massive they are and how much geometry is moving around,”
says Mojica. “But they’re basically being animated by a
wind deformer.” To give the sandy landscapes a more
realistic, gritty look, The Ether used the Landscape Shading Kit
for C4D (http://www.ericsmit.com/Landscape-Shading-Kit/index.html),
which offers several different pre-built landscape materials.

For the titles, The Ether created the wooden frame around the
characters’ IDs by first designing the shape in Illustrator
before bringing those vectors into Cinema 4D and extruding them.
Next, using an image of weathered wood, they gave the frame a
driftwood look. After Effects was used for compositing. “We
didn’t have to lay out UV’s or anything like
that,” says Mojica. “It was pretty straightforward as
far as materials went. Just finding the right materials was
something that we spent a little bit of time on, especially with
color and texture.”

Putting it all together

The opening title sequence builds to the reveal of the Tiki
statue of Austin and the show’s titles. To get there, The
Ether team developed an ambitious flowing camera move through the
island’s foliage. “One of the unique things we did on
this project was to create the camera move with simple 2D elements
and After Effects, Andy Austin explains. “And then we sent
that camera move to Cinema 4D.”

Using the camera from After Effects, Mojica then created all the
3D elements seen in the final shot. Once they got all of the shots
established in Cinema 4D, they rendered everything before bringing
it back into After Effects to add motion blur, camera shake and
sound effects. They also used Video Copilot’s Action
Essentials (https://www.videocopilot.net/products/action2)
to create the smoke rising from the metal barrels and the flying
dirt effects.

“It was really great to be able to go back and forth
because while I was modeling, Andy was able to get all the motion
tests timed out and approved,” Mojica recalls. “So by
the time I was done with all the modeling, all I had to do was set
up the scene within the camera that he used in After Effects.

The Ether created a day and a night version of the final animation,
as well as a sunset version of the opening. CMT uses each of them,
depending on the time of day. Recently, Kupiec and his team learned
that Redneck Island has been renewed for a second season
and CMT would like them to start work in October. The first goal
will be to re-cut the opening title sequence to incorporate a new
set of cast members and footage from the new season. “We may
also be doing some new game play graphics specific to the new
season’s challenges,” says Kupiec. “We’re
all looking forward to getting started and finding out what the
next season has to offer. And of course will have our office pool
to pick the winner of season 2.”